An inquiry judge has found Manitoba child welfare fundamentally misunderstood its mandate to protect children, leaving a murdered five-year-old girl “defenceless against her mother’s cruelty” and the “sadistic violence” of the woman’s boyfriend.

Commissioner Ted Hughes is recommending Manitoba should also take the lead to address the disproportionate number of aboriginal children in care across Canada.

In his final report into the death of Phoenix Sinclair, Hughes said the child welfare system family to protect the little girl or support her family.

“At least 13 times throughout her life, Winnipeg Child and Family Services received notice of concerns for Phoenix’s safety and well-being from various sources, the last one coming three months before her death,” Hughes wrote in his three-volume report released Friday. “Throughout, files were opened and closed, often without a social worker ever laying eyes on Phoenix.

“Unfortunately, the system failed to act on what it knew, with tragic results.”

Phoenix was defenceless against her mother’s cruelty

The little girl was killed by her mother and the woman’s boyfriend in 2005.

Phoenix was apprehended at birth and, throughout her life, 27 different agency workers were involved in her file. She was repeatedly returned to her mother, Samantha Kematch, despite concerns about what the judge called the woman’s indifference toward her daughter.

Kematch and her boyfriend, Karl McKay, neglected, confined, tortured and beat Phoenix. She ultimately died of her extensive injuries on the cold basement floor of the couple’s home on the Fisher River reserve. She was buried in a shallow grave by the community dump and Kematch continued to collect child subsidy cheques.

Both adults were convicted of first-degree murder in 2008.

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Hughes said the little girl’s fate was sealed once Kematch began her relationship with McKay and took custody of Phoenix in 2004. McKay was “a dangerous man, from whom the agency could have, and should have, saved Phoenix,” the judge wrote.

“Phoenix was defenceless against her mother’s cruelty and neglect, and the sadistic violence of McKay, whose identity was never researched by the agency, but about whom it had ample disturbing information,” Hughes continued. “By not accessing and acting on the information it had, and by not following the roadmaps offered by clear-thinking workers, the child-welfare system failed to protect Phoenix and support her family.”

The inquiry, which cost $14 million, sat for 91 days and heard testimony from 126 witnesses. Hughes has made 62 recommendations, noting that improvements have been made to the system, but there is still more work to be done.

HandoutPhoenix Sinclair

He said child-welfare agencies must assess the safety and well-being of a child when a family comes to their attention — something he emphasized requires face-to-face contact.

Each social worker should also be responsible for no more than 20 cases, he said. Testimony at the inquiry heard that some workers were responsible for up to 40 cases. Workers should be properly trained on the inter-generational impact of residential schools and hold a degree in social work or an equivalent, Hughes said.

Manitoba must also work to force aboriginal children in care onto the national agenda, Hughes suggested. Across Canada, he said, more aboriginal children are taken from their homes — not because they are aboriginal — but because they are living in poverty and their parents are often suffering from addictions.

“It is a problem that extends beyond the boundaries of Manitoba,” Hughes wrote. “It is a serious national problem and it needs to be tackled at a national level.”

Manitoba Family Services Minister Kerri Irvin-Ross said Premier Greg Selinger has already asked of his fellow premiers that the matter be discussed at an upcoming meeting.

She said the province is also drafting legislation to make the reporting of critical incidents mandatory, similar to the way they are in the health system. The province accepts Hughes’ recommendations and has appointed an implementation team to examine how to put them into practice, Irvin-Ross said.

No child will ever become invisible again, she said.

It is a serious national problem

“We are doing this because we want to move away from a culture of secrecy and individual blame and toward a culture of safety and learning focusing on protecting our children,” Irvin-Ross said.

“The child welfare system failed Phoenix Sinclair. We deeply regret and are profoundly saddened by the loss of this child.”

Kim Edwards, a woman who cared for Phoenix for much of her life, said she was pleased with the “scathing report” and hopeful that its recommendations will be followed.

“I feel a little less weight on us,” she said following the report’s release. “In 2006 when we found out about Phoenix, the first thing that I did was I went to see her dad and I promised her justice. What I’ve read of the recommendations, I think that I have achieved and kept that promise.”

But Edwards said she’s skeptical that the government and child-welfare agencies will implement all the recommendations from the inquiry. There have been many reports and recommendations since Phoenix’s death, she said. Yet, Edwards said other children continue to fall through the cracks.

“I need to see the changes,” she said.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/manitoba-child-welfare-left-murdered-girl-at-mercy-of-mom-boyfriend-judge/feed0stdPhoenix Sinclair is shown in a family photo released by the Commission of Inquiry looking into her 2005 death. Kim Edwards, who looked after Phoenix Sinclair during part of her short life, told an inquiry into the girl's death that her legacy must be one of hope and renewal.HandoutPhoenix Sinclair inquiry told aboriginals need control of child welfare, because Ottawa has failed themhttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/phoenix-sinclair-inquiry-told-aboriginals-need-control-of-child-welfare-because-ottawa-has-failed-them
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Aboriginals need more control over child welfare, education and other social programs because government efforts have largely failed them, a Manitoba inquiry was told Monday.

Aboriginal parents have good reason not to trust social workers who seize their children, lawyer Catherine Dunn said, given the impact of the residential school system which, for decades, separated children from their families.

“It comes back down to that kitchen door opening and somebody coming in and taking your children, and you saying to the mother ’get past that … we’re here to help you.”’

“It is asking too much of aboriginal families in Manitoba who did trust the system, who gave their children away to the Indian residential school system and received them back as shadows of their former selves.”

It has got to do with multi-generational trauma that resulted in unhealthy coping behaviours

Dunn represents Ka Ni Kanichihk, a non-profit group that provides community programs to at-risk aboriginals. She was the last of more than a dozen lawyers to make final submissions to the inquiry into the 2005 death of Phoenix Sinclair.

The inquiry is examining how the child welfare system failed to protect Phoenix, who was abused and beaten to death at the age of five by her mother and mother’s boyfriend. Phoenix had spent most of her life in foster care or with family friends and was killed shortly after social workers decided she could remain with her mother.

In its later stages, the inquiry has also been examining broader social issues — why aboriginal children make up the vast majority of children in care and why rates of poverty and substance abuse are high.

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“We know why that is so and it has got nothing to do with parenting,” Dunn said.

“It has got to do with Indian residential schools. It has got to do with multi-generational trauma that resulted in unhealthy coping behaviours.”

Dunn called on inquiry Commissioner Ted Hughes to recommend more social programs be delivered through aboriginal-run groups. She also asked for more funding and said parents whose children have been taken by social workers should have the right to a publicly-funded advocate.

Earlier Monday, another lawyer called for a separate school system for aboriginals in Winnipeg. Greg Tramley, who represents the advocacy group Aboriginal Council of Winnipeg, said it would be much like Manitoba’s Francophone school system — subject to provincial standards, but designed to protect the culture of its students.

“The community would then obviously have an ability to make it culturally appropriate and provide for some of the flexibility that isn’t there today.”

The inquiry has heard from 126 witnesses since it began last September. Lawyers are being given an opportunity this week to reply to each other’s final submissions. Hughes’ report is expected by mid-December.

WINNIPEG — A woman who alerted authorities to the death of a Manitoba girl cried Monday as she testified about the abuse the child endured during her final days.

“They shot at her with a pellet gun and … played a game with her called choking the chicken,” the woman told an inquiry into Phoenix Sinclair’s death.

“Wesley [McKay] would grab her and throw her on the couch and they would all laugh,” the woman, who cannot be identified under a publication ban, continued between sobs.

She said she did not see the abuse herself, but was told about it by two sons she had with Karl Wesley McKay, who was convicted of first-degree murder in the five-year-old girl’s beating death in 2005. McKay was by then living with Phoenix’s mother, Samantha Kematch, who was also convicted in the killing.

The woman’s sons were staying with McKay, Kematch and Phoenix on the Fisher River reserve in the spring and summer of 2005.

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The abuse Phoenix suffered was detailed at Kematch and McKay’s murder trial, which was told the girl was frequently confined to a bare basement room, forced to eat her own vomit and choked until she lost consciousness.

The inquiry is examining how Manitoba child welfare failed to protect Phoenix, who had spent much of her life in foster care or with family friends before being returned to Kematch. Months before Phoenix’s death, social workers paid a short visit to Kematch, didn’t actually see the child, but decided all was well.

In June of 2005, Phoenix died after a brutal assault on the basement floor of the family’s home. McKay and Kematch buried her in a shallow grave near a landfill and continued to pretend she was alive.

The woman testified Monday that she thought Phoenix was staying with other relatives. But in February 2006, one of the woman’s sons told her that Phoenix had been killed by McKay. The woman called authorities. McKay and Kematch were arrested a short time later.

The woman told the inquiry McKay had always been a violent man and had tried to kill her twice in the five years they were together.

“He always fought me where the bruises wouldn’t show. It was always under my clothes.”

On one occasion, she testified, McKay tried to throw her and their infant son down a staircase. Another time, he came at her with a machete.

“[McKay’s] sister gave me a machete because I was alone all the time, and he tried to use that machete on me.”

McKay also had a long record of domestic violence outlined in the province’s family services central database. But social workers never caught on that he had become part of Phoenix’s life.

The inquiry has already heard of a list of failures by social workers.

Social workers were sometimes unaware of who was taking care of Phoenix — usually it was friends of the family or relatives, for days or weeks at a time. In 2003, she was seized from her biological father’s home after a day-long drinking party where suspected gang members were present.

The father was told to undergo alcohol counselling before he could get his daughter back. He didn’t, but regained custody anyway.

The woman who testified Monday lashed out at social workers at one point for their handling of Phoenix’s case.

WINNIPEG — It went unspoken but you could practically see it in the air at the Phoenix Sinclair inquiry, the imperceptible nod toward the woman in the witness stand with accompanying sorrowful caption: “You see? You see what we have to deal with?”

Nick Tragianis/National PostThe Impala will launch in April with a 3.6-litre V6. Later in the year, GM will add two more engines: a 2.5-litre 4-cylinder and a 2.4-litre eAssist mill

Kim Edwards, one of the only two people in the world who by every measure there is only ever loved and cared for that little aboriginal girl, was testifying, in her inimitably volatile way.

She was alternately raging and crying. She was speechifying. She was accusatory. About dates and times, she was hopeless, losing a year here, gaining it back there. A chip the size of the Portage and Main intersection was there on her shoulder for all to see.

She was being cross-examined Thursday by Gordon McKinnon, lawyer for the Winnipeg Child and Family Services agency.

He, poor fellow, took the lead on the cross, but there are at least nine lawyers here representing seven child-welfare arms of the province’s octopus of a system, plus lawyers for the union and government and even the University of Manitoba’s faculty of social work.

Their interests may diverge slightly now and then, but make no mistake, they are considerably invested in the status quo and united in defending the substantial rear quarters of Manitoba child welfare.

Mr. McKinnon and Ms. Edwards had been going round and round about the reluctance of Ms. Edwards, her then-husband Rohan Stephenson, and Phoenix’s biological father Steve Sinclair to reach out to the CFS for help.

(Frankly, the very notion is preposterous. It’s a variation of the bad old line, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” It’s a safe bet that very few people, especially those on the margins, would ever put “CFS” and “help” in the same sentence.)

Mr. McKinnon’s theory — and more broadly, it seems, the likely defence of child welfare for its failure to protect Phoenix — is that the agency couldn’t know what it didn’t know, and that Ms. Edwards et al. were actively keeping critical information from CFS social workers.

In other words, they didn’t tell us what they knew and thus we couldn’t have realized the child was in danger.

The five-year-old girl was under the agency’s ostensibly watchful eye for much of her short life.

It isn’t yet clear from inquiry evidence quite when precisely the CFS closed her file for the final time, but it appears to have been mere months before Phoenix was murdered by her biological mother, Samantha Kematch, and her mother’s then-lover Karl Wes McKay. Both were convicted of first-degree murder four years ago.

However, what is established is that in April of 2004, Kematch came and got the little girl from Mr. Stephenson, and at some point disappeared with her to a northern reserve, where the trio vanished from CFS radar screens and Phoenix was ultimately beaten to death.

Her absence wasn’t even recognized for almost 10 months, her remains found some short time after that.

It’s a safe bet that very few people, especially those on the margins, would ever put “CFS” and “help” in the same sentence

It’s also clear that Ms. Edwards and Mr. Stephenson weren’t forthcoming with the CFS, though chiefly in regards to their own situation. They had split up and were living apart when the agency gave its blessing to a private arrangement that left Phoenix in what was purportedly their joint care.

The important thing, however, is that Mr. Stephenson did in fact look after the little girl, and if it wasn’t an ideal situation — he was working overnight shifts, the couple’s teenage sons would take turns being late for school until he got to the house in the mornings — Phoenix was safe.

The couple was also protective of Mr. Sinclair, unwilling to fully rat him out to the authorities — how much he was drinking, how little time he was spending with his child.

This is regrettable, to be sure, but it should not come as a surprise to child-welfare workers that their adult customers fear them, may loathe them and may try to evade them.

But, as Ms. Edwards pointed out with devastating impact, the CFS already had all the information they should have needed to act, from their workers and others. What she and Mr. Stephenson and Mr. Sinclair didn’t tell them ought to have been gravy; the meat-and-potatoes was in the agency’s own files.

Both Kematch and Mr. Sinclair had themselves been permanent wards and had protection files. Kematch’s first baby had been taken into care by a Cree agency and the CFS had a lengthy report to this effect. Both parents had backgrounds where violence, addictions and abuse were the norms; they were showing every sign of repeating the terrible cycle themselves.

As Ms. Edwards put it, this when Mr. McKinnon pointed out that neither she, nor Mr. Stephenson nor Mr. Sinclair had warned the agency of “protection concerns” for Phoenix, “Nobody knew this woman [Kematch] was a psychopath except the CFS workers who had her in-care file!”

So what, then, was the purpose of the exercise but to show the world that child-welfare workers have to deal with difficult and hostile people? The world knew that going in. It doesn’t get either agency or worker off the hook. It merely makes the lot of them look like bullies.

WINNIPEG — Lawyers for Manitoba’s embattled child-welfare system have signalled they’re going to use the aged records of a woman whose child was apprehended when she was a teenager to discredit her as a witness at the provincial Phoenix Sinclair inquiry now going on here.

The inquiry is probing the 2005 death of the little girl, whose remains weren’t discovered, in a dump on a northern reserve, until 10 months later.

The first of Toronto’s several fashion week-related events began Wednesday with The Shows at Andrew Richard DesignsThe first of Toronto’s several fashion week-related events began Wednesday evening with The Shows, the runway presentations staged at Andrew Richard Designs event space in the city’s east end. After each Fall/Winter 2013 runway, the designer(s) did a brief onstage Q&A with Dr. Alexandra Palmer, curator of textiles and costumes at the Royal Ontario Museum, that offered a peek into the creative process.
<b>COMRAGS</b>
<b>Hometown: </b>Toronto
<strong>What they showed: </strong>Border prints — one in a black woven wool with grey pattern of peaks and slashes that recalls both quills and a distant mountain range, as dresses and coats, and long and lean tunic and tea-length vests. There was fatigue-green Crush, a fabric with a sheen, as cropped pants, dresses and tailored jackets with exposed pockets, and a silk twill border print that allowed more plays on volume, often with tacked and tucked interest creating sculptural volume at the back of garments. And it was all accented with glittering matte gold sequined spat sockettes slipped into Fluevog heels and mannish oxford flats.
[caption id="attachment_100141" align="alignleft" width="320"]<a href="http://wpmedia.news.nationalpost.com/2013/03/comrags.jpg"><img class=" wp-image-100141 " alt="Nathalie Atkinson" src="http://wpmedia.news.nationalpost.com/2013/03/comrags.jpg&quot; width="320" height="426" /></a> Nathalie Atkinson[/caption]
<b>What they said: </b>Joyce Gunhouse and Judy Cornish have been designing together for 30 years and keep things interesting with restrictive challenges, they said. First, the idea of simple dressing — for fall, no outfit or runway look could require more than two pieces, which meant they had to put aside their penchant for layering. That was also the reason they chose border prints to feature, because they’re more difficult to work with, to line up the pattern on panels of jackets and sleeves. The exposed pocket insides peeking out the bottom hems of tops and jackets is a nod to the fact that they want things to look as good inside as out, and the idea of items being handmade, in the manner of their cherished vintage finds. They take ready-made expensive photo printed silk fabric, Palmer observed, and further manipulate it by machine-washing then not ironing it, Cornish explained, after it has been assembled, “so that it has already lived a life when you get it.”
<b>JEAN-PIERRE BRAGANZA</b>
<b>Home base: </b>London, England
<b>What he showed: </b>In my notes, these words: “Beating drums, a hemline like smoke, kaleidoscope.” That translates as an atomic pattern of connected astronomic lines and circles, as though drawing constellations into the Night Sky app, on very sharp, skinny-hipped and wide, boxy shouldered silhouettes. The hemline like smoke is an ombré chiffon skirt, worn with Japanese samurai-style maitre d’ tailored jackets. Astrakhan sleeves, shiny and matte contrasts and curving zippered pegged three-colour cropped trousers (in '80s teal, peach and some purple) completed the look. But it’s the original viscose crepe pattern that was most memorable - it recalls both a mirrored tribal motif and the waves typical of Florentine endpapers.
<b>What he said: </b>Braganza supports the British mill industry as well as a Swiss-Italian mill that created his piercing, tribal print and it was sharply printed, highly detailed with a 3D effect, and on one sleeve in orange, like a firebird. The pattern on the white leather bomber jacket that has a shape like Neoprene, Braganza explained, was not in fact a printing but a process of lazercutting the leather from the verso, effectively scoring the pattern into the material from beneath. The punctures, not pattern, also create the unique volume by push-pulling on the leather. “I don’t know if you out to unzip her or not,” Dr. Palmer joked, about the convertible outfit on one model. “I generally do but not in public!” Braganza returned, before unzipping the bottom panel off a long jacketed look. Convertibility is a hallmark of his clothes and that particular panel doubles as a skirt.
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Phoenix was in and out of care with the Winnipeg Child and Family Services agency for much of her short life, and the agency already has been sharply criticized for its handling of the case.

At least one report after Phoenix’s death found the agency had failed the child, and the evidence at the inquiry thus far is that the collective effort to keep her safe was feeble, if not abject.

The little girl was repeatedly returned to the care of one or another of her parents, both of whom were noted in CFS’s own files to be profoundly troubled young people, with drinking problems, ghastly backgrounds and significant instability.

Some times months passed without a worker even clamping eyes on the vulnerable child.

On Wednesday, Kim Edwards, who was the de facto mother for the five-year-old aboriginal girl, had finished her evidence-in-chief at the inquiry.

In it, she was harshly — albeit sometimes incoherently — critical of the CFS.

Ms. Edwards and her then-husband, Rohan Stephenson, actually cared for Phoenix, who was murdered by her biological mother, Semantha Kematch, and her mother’s then-lover Karl McKay, for most of her life.

Ms. Edwards flatly denied that some meetings with agency workers ever took place and in effect accused CFS social workers and supervisors of inventing a paper trail.

She and Mr. Stephenson were friends with Phoenix’s biological father, Steve Sinclair, who usually managed to care for Phoenix by himself for short periods and would hand her back to Ms. Edwards and Mr. Stephenson.

After Ms. Edwards finished her evidence-in-chief, the inquiry broke so lawyers for the various parties that have standing at the inquiry could decide who would kick off her cross-examination.

But the scheduled five-minute recess turned into half an hour when the lawyers refused to start until they could discuss and distribute new documents.

Kris Saxberg, who represents the so-called General Authority — the body that oversees the Winnipeg CFS — told inquiry head, retired Judge Ted Hughes, that only after Ms. Edwards revealed in her testimony she once had a daughter taken into care more than 20 years earlier did the agency learn of it.

Because the case involved a child and a parent who was herself a minor, Mr. Saxberg said, “it’s a sealed file … that’s the reason the information wasn’t known to us.”

The inference was clear — the agency now wanted to get access to the sealed file.

But Ms. Edwards had already testified to the fact that when she was a young mother with a violent partner, the CFS had taken her daughter into care for about 20 months.

She testified the child was returned when she fled the relationship and established herself on her own, remained in her care, and that the agency was never again involved with her family.

Ms. Edwards also admitted she’d not told this to the CFS workers who were ostensibly monitoring Phoenix. She said the matter was so long ago, she had forgotten to mention it.

She and Mr. Stephenson, who separated while they cared for Phoenix and are now divorced, didn’t disclose the details of their breakup to the CFS.

In fact, it’s clear that they were generally wary of child-welfare authorities, and if not outright unco-operative, less than forthcoming.

But there’s been not a shred of evidence that Ms. Edwards and Mr. Stephenson did anything other than provide a loving, stable home to the little girl who so badly needed one.

Mr. Stephenson was particularly honest about their lack of frankness in his testimony here, admitting at one point that he had lied to workers about the fact that Ms. Edwards had moved out because he wanted to increase the chances they would get “to keep Phoenix”.

Outside the hearing room, after he had finished testifying, Mr. Stephenson explained this by saying that what the child-welfare system most needs to know is that, as he put it, “We’re all afraid of them”.

Mr. Saxberg also told Judge Hughes that the lawyers wanted to obtain Ms. Edwards’ social-assistance records to determine who was actually living with Phoenix, her or Mr. Stephenson, at the time the CFS formally declared the couple’s residence “a place of safety” for the little girl.

But when the judge questioned him on the need and relevance of the “new” documents, Mr. Saxberg then said that though the one file was sealed, in the several hours since Ms. Edwards’ disclosure the agency had managed to discover Ms. Edwards’ own “protection file”.

And there’s the rub: The CFS, it appears, can get its hands on any file quickly, and is prepared to go to any lengths, if its own arse is on the line.

When it’s the tinier bum of a vulnerable child like Phoenix Sinclair, not so much: It is quite disgraceful.

WINNIPEG — As a general observation, it often seems as though half the people in this city are outright broken — the human husks that remain after generations of alcohol abuse, residential schools and profound dysfunction — while the other half make a pretty decent living picking over the bones of the first.

Where else in Canada is it possible to find within two short city blocks a wide-ranging provincial inquiry going on into the death of one little aboriginal girl and, at the Law Courts just down the street, a fatality inquest starting up into the death of another?

The first is the inquiry into the death of Phoenix Sinclair, who was killed at the age of five by her biological mother, Samantha Kematch, and her mother’s then-boyfriend Karl Wes McKay.

The second is examining the death of Jaylene Redhead, who was killed at the age of 20 months by her biological mother, Nicole Redhead.

All the killers are safely in prison, Kematch and McKay convicted of first-degree murder in 2008 and sentenced to life, Redhead having pleaded guilty to manslaughter in 2010 and now serving 12 years.

But the truth is that neither mother ever should have come within a country mile of her kids, neither mother ever had a fighting chance and neither mother probably belongs in prison.

Instead, both Kematch’s and Redhead’s remarkably similar pathologies were enabled by two different child-welfare agencies — Winnipeg Child and Family Services in the first instance, Awasis Agency of Northern Manitoba in the second.

Kematch ended up with Phoenix in her charge despite warnings the child was at risk if with either parent.

Redhead was living in her own suite at the Native Women’s Transition Centre, the Awasis agency having in effect illegally delegated its responsibility to supervise Redhead to the centre, with the result that she was left pretty much alone.

The women were repeatedly reunited with their vulnerable children; they were encouraged to “parent” in the language of child-welfare, despite either a noticeable lack of interest or ability in doing so, and then, in essence, they were left on their own to “cope” as best they could.

Tom AndrichArgentina's Jorge Bergoglio, elected Pope Francis I (C) appears at the window of St Peter's Basilica's balcony after being elected the 266th pope of the Roman Catholic Church on March 13, 2013 at the Vatican. AFP PHOTO / ANDREAS SOLAROANDREAS SOLARO,ANDREAS SOLARO/AFP/Getty Images

They were set up to fail by a legion of genuinely overworked but nonetheless inept social workers (there are some notable exceptions, probably in both files, but these rare jewels were either overruled by their superiors or ground to defeat by the bureaucracy), and fail they did.

Kematch and Redhead were each born to violent drinking mothers and raised, if it can be called that, in the familiar triad of aboriginal dysfunction of this country — amid violence and poverty, sexual abuse and a fog of alcohol and drugs.

Kematch had a brother who killed himself; little Phoenix’s biological father, Steve Sinclair, has a sister who was herself convicted of manslaughter in the death of another child for whom she was caring.

But Redhead can top both of those stories for sheer horror: Her mother killed her father when she was nine — thoughtfully, in front of the little girl.

Undiagnosed the two women may still be, but the odds are excellent that they are both probably afflicted with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Disorder, the range of disabilities caused in the womb by drinking mothers.

Unless Kematch and Redhead had been given exceptional supports and counselling, and of course vigorous monitoring to protect their kids, they would never have had the simple cognitive functioning it takes to be a parent.

Kematch has had five children — her first son, who was apprehended from her, Phoenix, the one she and McKay killed, Echo, who died as an infant of a respiratory infection, and two others who are in care.

The truth is that neither mother ever should have come within a country mile of her kids, neither mother ever had a fighting chance and neither mother probably belongs in prison

Redhead has had four children.

Her first son had been in and out of her care; her second, who was born “in distress,” that is, suffering from withdrawal from cocaine and alcohol, was in and out; and Jaylene, whom she killed.

She was pregnant with the fourth baby when Jaylene’s death was discovered.

She had all that in her background and was under investigation by Winnipeg Police, though not yet criminally charged, but, as provincial court Judge Lawrence Allen learned Tuesday at the inquest, even then the Awasis agency “had no plans to intervene with her expected child.”

In fact, unbelievably, the agency had placed her with a sister, who had five young children, while she awaited her charges.

The judge was hearing testimony from Justine Grain, a special investigator with the provincial children’s advocate who reviewed the case after Jaylene’s death.

Ms. Grain was preceded to the witness stand by a pathologist who described Jaylene’s injuries — they included dozens of bruises, human bite marks to her thighs and a swollen vaginal area — and by Redhead herself.

Clad in sweatpants, shackled at the ankles, she is now 29. I caught only the last 45 minutes of her evidence, wherein tears flowed down her cheeks even as she displayed what psychiatrists call a flat affect.

Her cognitive deficits appeared even to my untrained eye to be significant. Asked who had taught her how to care for the baby, she said it was only other young mothers at the residence. How would they help?

“ ‘You should put this on your baby’,” she said. “ ‘You should give this to your baby, it would be good for him.’ ” This was the sage advice she quoted. She was still angry at a doctor who “didn’t do anything” for a cold Jaylene had had. The fact that Jaylene had died because she had smothered her completely eluded her. Then she got very angry, and snapped, “I’m not coming here again. If you send me back to that cell, I’m not coming back here.”

She was led from the courtroom like that, angry and weeping like a giant child, the grotesque icing to Winnipeg’s greatest shame.

At a child-death inquiry that already has heard revelations of missing files and shredded notes, it was irresistibly dramatic — a new allegation of an “altered” report.

This is the essence of what social worker Debbie De Gale said Monday at the probe examining the death of five-year-old Phoenix Sinclair.

Phoenix was murdered in June of 2005 by her biological mother, Semantha Kematch, and her then-boyfriend, Karl Wes McKay, the pair convicted of first-degree murder four years ago.

Yet though Winnipeg’s Child and Family Services agency was ostensibly looking out for the little girl’s best interests for virtually her entire life, the child’s battered remains weren’t even discovered in a dump on a northern reserve for another 10 months, shortly after it was realized she was missing.

Ms. De Gale’s recommendation in May of 2004 that Phoenix’s situation should be immediately checked out — within 24 hours — was X’ed out by a supervisor and downgraded to a 48-hour response, without, she said, her consent or knowledge.

By Ms. De Gale’s frail manner, low voice, long pauses and general breathlessness, and by the buzz that went around the hearing room at her revelation, one might have imagined she was testifying under fire and that the one-day gap was of critical significance.

Yet if there is real import to any of her evidence, it is likely that it may speak to the mala fides or sheer ineptitude — it is really almost magnificent — of the CFS bureaucracy.

But as a practical matter, whether the recommendation was 24 hours or 48 or five minutes doesn’t matter a whit: The agency dropped the ball.

By records before the inquiry thus far, it is not clear precisely when the CFS washed its hands of the file — and the little girl — for good.

Tantalizing glimpses of documents briefly displayed on inquiry screens Monday show that after Ms. De Gale’s report, Phoenix’s file was subjected to an “open/close” eight months later, in December of 2004, and opened again for at least two days in March of 2005 — or about three months before the little girl was killed.

As the complete documents aren’t yet exhibits, it isn’t known what the rationale was for the “open/close” or what happened to what appears to have been the final opportunity for Phoenix to have been rescued from the basement pen where Kematch and McKay kept her.

The alteration to Ms. De Gale’s report notwithstanding, the real alchemy that took place within the agency is how on earth Kematch and Phoenix’s biological father, Steve Sinclair, ever came to have continuing contact with the child, let alone be left in charge of her.

The alteration to Ms. De Gale’s report notwithstanding, the real alchemy that took place within the agency is how on earth Kematch and Phoenix’s biological father, Steve Sinclair, ever came to have continuing contact with the child, let alone be left in charge of her

Kematch’s first child, a son she had when she was just 17, was taken into care after efforts by a Cree child-welfare agency to help and interest the young mother in caring for the baby failed.

Kematch’s and Mr. Sinclair’s second child together, a baby girl named Echo, died of a respiratory infection when Phoenix was about a year old.

Both had been permanent wards themselves, and to call their families and upbringing dysfunctional is a gross understatement. Both families were so filled with alcoholism, violence, physical and other abuse they were pathological.

All that information — and more — was in the agency’s own files, as were early warnings that Mr. Sinclair shouldn’t be left alone with vulnerable children and that Kematch was aggressive and sometimes violent, even as a girl herself, with youngsters.

Yet Phoenix was repeatedly returned to one or another of the young parents — they separated when the little girl was about a year old, perhaps sooner — though each return was short-lived and unsuccessful.

The person who appears did the best social work on the case didn’t work for Winnipeg CFS, but rather for provincial employment and income assistance, the Manitoba social assistance folks.

She testified anonymously as a “Source of Referral” from another room at the inquiry before Ms. De Gale took the stand.

With both of Phoenix’s parents variously claiming her as a dependent, the welfare worker tried to find out where the child actually was, and managed to discover that Kematch was again pregnant, this time presumably by McKay; that Phoenix was living with the two of them, and that though she’d been told by one CFS worker that the child would be at risk if either parent got her back, she was also being told by other CFS staff that they had nothing like that in their files.

She sent emails to CFS, trying to find out who actually had proper custody of the child, who should be getting the family benefit, to confusing results.

Finally, on May 11, the welfare worker phoned the CFS night line to report her concerns.

That call is what sparked Ms. De Gale’s report — altered as it ended up being — but neither call nor report sparked any concrete action by the agency.

That call is what sparked Ms. De Gale’s report — altered as it ended up being — but neither call nor report sparked any concrete action by the agency

What did happen, two days after the welfare worker phoned, is that one CFS worker wrote another in an internal email that he’d confirmed the little girl was indeed with her mother and that, since the father hadn’t been seen for ages, he rather cheerfully concluded, “I believe mom is our client.”

Actually, no: That little girl, about “yay-high” as Rohan Stephenson — her best caregiver, and a man who actually loved her — once said, she was the client.

Just a year before Phoenix Sinclair disappeared from under the nose of Winnipeg’s Child and Family Services agency only to turn up dead in a northern reserve dump, a judge’s report on another aboriginal child-welfare tragedy was released.

Manitoba Provincial Court Judge Arnold Conner’s report under the Fatality Inquiries Act into the Jan. 26, 1996 death of baby Sophia Schmidt excoriated the work of several CFS workers and supervisors.

At one point, the judge remarked that while Manitoba may have a working child-welfare system, what it doesn’t have is “a child-welfare system that works.”

Stunningly, little Sophia’s death — she suffered fatal brain swelling after being shaken, but also a raft of other terrible injuries, including broken bones and bite marks — was caused by none other than Norma Jean Sinclair, sister of Phoenix Sinclair’s father, Steve.

Mr. Sinclair, now 32, testified this week at the provincial inquiry now underway here into Phoenix’s death.

The little girl died shortly after her fifth birthday in June of 2005, her remains discovered 10 months later at the Fisher Lake First Nation dump.

She was last seen safe and well in April of 2004, when Rohan Stephenson, her de facto foster father, reluctantly handed her over to Samantha Kematch, her biological mother.

Kematch and her then-lover Karl McKay were convicted of first-degree murder in the death of the child they had confined to a basement pen, beaten and forced to eat her own vomit.

While Mr. Sinclair had no role in his daughter’s slaying, his dysfunction as a parent contributed to the ease with which Kematch was able to retrieve the little girl from Mr. Stephenson’s care and disappear with her.

Norma Jean Sinclair pleaded guilty to manslaughter in Sophia’s death and received a five-year prison sentence.

Her boyfriend and the biological father of Sophia, Wade Tanner, was convicted of criminal negligence in the nine-month-old’s death and went to jail for four years.

But the question that most absorbed the judge was how on earth Sophia had come to be placed by CFS into the home of Sinclair and Tanner, given their respective backgrounds of alcoholism, violence and monstrous dysfunction, much of it well-established in the agency’s own files.

“It is incomprehensible to me how the child-welfare system would permit” a vulnerable infant to be in the care of the couple, Judge Conner wrote.

At the time Sophia died, Norma Jean was 23. All four of her own children had at one time or another been taken into care.

One, who suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome — the silent villain in both these ghastly stories — was made a permanent ward.

Yet in the year before Sophia’s death, Norma Jean and Tanner somehow ended up caring for her two older boys and their own infant son with the blessing of the CFS.

And on top of that, into the couple’s home Sophia — a child of Tanner by another woman — Sophia was permitted to come.

The judge’s report also gives a searing glimpse into the profoundly troubled lives of the couple who are at the centre of the current inquiry, Kematch and Steve Sinclair.

CFS files now in evidence at the hearing show that Mr. Sinclair was removed from his mother’s clutches because of serious physical and sexual abuse, violence and her chronic alcoholism.

His sister Norma Jean was abandoned by that mother when she was six.

The mother left her in the care of an elderly couple who abused and starved her. When her father rescued her, it was to a home filled with abusive adults. Norma Jean was sexually and physically abused by her grandfather and cousins, and she and the other children routinely hid under their beds whenever their father arrived home, drunk and raging.

She had her first baby at 16.

Kematch was also born to a chronic alcoholic who physically and emotionally abused her. She was made a permanent ward of the Cree Nation Child and Family Caring Agency, and a lengthy report on file at the inquiry shows she was also a desperately unhappy young woman with a significant alcohol problem.

One of her brothers killed himself by jumping off an elevator.

Kematch had her first child at the age of 17.

Several CFS reports note Kematch was uninterested in her children — the third, a baby named Echo, died of pneumonia when Phoenix was about a year old.

The judge noted that the three young women in the tale he was examining — Norma Jean Sinclair, the friend who cared for her children and baby Sophia’s natural mother — had 17 children among them. Sixteen were apprehended.

In fact, the CFS files in the current case are replete with warnings about the young parents.

As early as 1998, a so-called “child in care form” described Mr. Sinclair as remaining “a highly disturbed individual who should not be in charge of dependent children,” while a lengthy report on Kematch from the Cree agency, sent to the CFS four days after Phoenix was born, describes her as “abnormally aggressive” young woman who poses “a threat to adults and other children” in her foster home.

As a cruel measure of the intergenerational nature of the crippling dysfunction in this story, Kematch for a time stayed in an emergency bed at the same hotel CFS used several years later to house Phoenix.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/christie-blatchford-phoenix-just-one-victim-of-intergenerational-disfunction-in-sinclair-family/feed0stdPhoenix Sinclair is shown in a family photo released by the Commission of Inquiry looking into her 2005 deathChristie Blatchford: ‘I was a liar and they were incompetent’: Phoenix Sinclair inquiry gets shot of unvarnished truthhttp://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/christie-blatchford-i-was-a-liar-and-they-were-incompetent-phoenix-sinclair-inquiry-gets-shot-of-unvarnished-truth
http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/christie-blatchford-i-was-a-liar-and-they-were-incompetent-phoenix-sinclair-inquiry-gets-shot-of-unvarnished-truth#commentsFri, 07 Dec 2012 01:35:48 +0000http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/?p=100235

WINNIPEG — There are no heroes in the Phoenix Sinclair story now unravelling at the provincial inquiry into her death, but a man who tells the unvarnished truth and who loved that little girl is close enough to count.

This is Rohan (pronounced Ron) Stephenson, the 42-year-old who was for much of Phoenix’s short life one-half of the couple who acted as her parents and who, when he and his wife split up, took over the in loco parentis role on his own.

He testified Thursday.

Mr. Stephenson was married to Kim Edwards when one or another of the little girl’s profoundly troubled young parents began dropping her off for babysitting.

At first, he said with trademark frankness, he “wasn’t thrilled” to have a baby added to the ranks of those already living in his small house — he and Ms. Edwards and their two boys — in the city’s hardscrabble north end.

But over time, as babysitting stints turned to more frequent stays and they turned to full-time care, Mr. Stephenson came to adore the little girl he called “Mount Fatty Boom-Boom,” because she was such a chunk, and who called him “Big Guy” in return, even though she couldn’t say the “Big” part very well.

By early 2004, Mr. Stephenson had Phoenix virtually all the time.

Her father, Steve Sinclair, was a drinker, and by this point was irregularly in his daughter’s life, and much of the time Mr. Stephenson didn’t even know where he was. The same was true of Phoenix’s mum, Samantha Kematch. The young people partied hard (“partying” is the inquiry euphemism for getting blind drunk), were unemployed and on social assistance.

Now, Mr. Stephenson sees himself as being on the margins of society, but he was and is nothing like Mr. Sinclair or Kematch.

Mike Aporius/Winnipeg Free Press filesRohan Stephenson and his former father-in-law Russell Edwards with Phoenix Sinclair. The photo is being held by Stephenson's ex-wife Kim Edwards.

He has never been on welfare. He was working back then as a caregiver for quadriplegics; he works in private child care now. He and his family have had no dealings with child welfare.

But as a low-income guy from the wrong part of town, he and Mr. Sinclair had things in common, among them a natural distrust of police and government agencies, especially the Winnipeg Child and Family Services, which in Mr. Stephenson’s observation specializes in “breaking families, not fixing them.”

So when he and Ms. Edwards broke up in early 2003, by which time they were both well and truly smitten with Phoenix, they didn’t tell the CFS they had parted. They wanted, as he put it, “to increase the chances of Phoenix” being allowed to stay with him.

“We just didn’t want her to go to some foster home,” he said. “We just wanted to keep her. It was pretty simple, as complicated as it is.”

None of this would matter a whit had things continued along normally, and all of it was for the benefit of the little girl.

But in April of 2004, Kematch showed up with her mother Bertha, wanting to take Phoenix out for a bit.

Mr. Stephenson was reluctant to let her go. He learned only much later that Kematch wasn’t merely distanced from and neglectful of Phoenix, but also actively cruel to her, and that the grandmother was as he put it “a crack head,” but still he was reluctant.

But he was exhausted too — those months of working nights and playing with Phoenix all day had taken their toll — and she was excited at the prospect of an outing.

“I thought Sam would get sick of her after two days,” he said, just as she had before, that she would bring back a slightly changed little girl (Phoenix was always different after a visit with mummy, Mr. Stephenson once told the RCMP), usually one with head lice.

This time, Kematch didn’t return with Phoenix, but disappeared off the edge of the world with her.

‘We can all agree: I was a liar and they were incompetent and 15,000 other circumstances came together, and Phoenix is dead’

The little girl was killed by her mother and her lover, Karl Wes McKay, both of whom were convicted of first-degree murder in 2008, two years after what was left of Phoenix’s body was discovered at the reserve dump at the Fisher Lake First Nation north of Winnipeg. She was five at the estimated time of her death — June of 2005.

The state of her remains made it difficult for pathologists to ascertain even the cause of death, other than that she had multiple injuries, including a skull fracture.

Evidence at the murder trial showed the little girl had suffered terribly, was beaten, shot at with a BB gun, forced to eat her own vomit and confined to a basement pen.

If Mr. Stephenson had confessed to the CFS that Ms. Edwards wasn’t living there, that he was working nights at the care home, that his two boys were “taking turns going late to school” so that he could get home to look after Phoenix, it was unlikely the CFS would have allowed the little girl to stay with them.

So he didn’t tell, and the agency, by the evidence the inquiry has heard thus far, didn’t ask many questions: Unspoken, they worked out their own don’t ask, don’t tell policy.

In cross-examination by Kris Saxberg, lawyer for Manitoba’s uber-child welfare agency ominously called the General Authority, Mr. Stephenson admitted that his failure to fill in the CFS “probably did hinder the flow of information,” though, he noted wryly, “a little bit of interest from anyone [at CFS] would have uncovered most of this anyway.

“I was not conveying information to CFS and if I had conveyed it, they may or may not have acted in the same way,” he said.

He said he wasn’t trying to blame the agency, and that he shoulders a portion of responsibility himself, or, as Mr. Stephenson put it with the special ruthlessness that a human being can direct only to himself, “We can all agree: I was a liar and they [the CFS] were incompetent and 15,000 other circumstances came together, and Phoenix is dead.”

It is a dreadful précis from a good and honourable man. It is a real comfort to imagine that little girl not in her basement pen, but rather as Mount Fatty Boom-Boom, being smooched and cuddled by the Big Guy.

WINNIPEG — It isn’t surprising that Steve Sinclair should be, as an old saying I’d not heard until recently has it, “eating from both sides of the can.”

It means to profess one thing and do another, while claiming the credit for both. Here at the inquiry into the death of Phoenix Sinclair, eating from both sides of the can is the provincial pastime.

The first of Toronto’s several fashion week-related events began Wednesday with The Shows at Andrew Richard DesignsThe first of Toronto’s several fashion week-related events began Wednesday evening with The Shows, the runway presentations staged at Andrew Richard Designs event space in the city’s east end. After each Fall/Winter 2013 runway, the designer(s) did a brief onstage Q&A with Dr. Alexandra Palmer, curator of textiles and costumes at the Royal Ontario Museum, that offered a peek into the creative process.
<b>COMRAGS</b>
<b>Hometown: </b>Toronto
<strong>What they showed: </strong>Border prints — one in a black woven wool with grey pattern of peaks and slashes that recalls both quills and a distant mountain range, as dresses and coats, and long and lean tunic and tea-length vests. There was fatigue-green Crush, a fabric with a sheen, as cropped pants, dresses and tailored jackets with exposed pockets, and a silk twill border print that allowed more plays on volume, often with tacked and tucked interest creating sculptural volume at the back of garments. And it was all accented with glittering matte gold sequined spat sockettes slipped into Fluevog heels and mannish oxford flats.
[caption id="attachment_100141" align="alignleft" width="320"]<a href="http://wpmedia.news.nationalpost.com/2013/03/comrags.jpg"><img class=" wp-image-100141 " alt="Nathalie Atkinson" src="http://wpmedia.news.nationalpost.com/2013/03/comrags.jpg&quot; width="320" height="426" /></a> Nathalie Atkinson[/caption]
<b>What they said: </b>Joyce Gunhouse and Judy Cornish have been designing together for 30 years and keep things interesting with restrictive challenges, they said. First, the idea of simple dressing — for fall, no outfit or runway look could require more than two pieces, which meant they had to put aside their penchant for layering. That was also the reason they chose border prints to feature, because they’re more difficult to work with, to line up the pattern on panels of jackets and sleeves. The exposed pocket insides peeking out the bottom hems of tops and jackets is a nod to the fact that they want things to look as good inside as out, and the idea of items being handmade, in the manner of their cherished vintage finds. They take ready-made expensive photo printed silk fabric, Palmer observed, and further manipulate it by machine-washing then not ironing it, Cornish explained, after it has been assembled, “so that it has already lived a life when you get it.”
<b>JEAN-PIERRE BRAGANZA</b>
<b>Home base: </b>London, England
<b>What he showed: </b>In my notes, these words: “Beating drums, a hemline like smoke, kaleidoscope.” That translates as an atomic pattern of connected astronomic lines and circles, as though drawing constellations into the Night Sky app, on very sharp, skinny-hipped and wide, boxy shouldered silhouettes. The hemline like smoke is an ombré chiffon skirt, worn with Japanese samurai-style maitre d’ tailored jackets. Astrakhan sleeves, shiny and matte contrasts and curving zippered pegged three-colour cropped trousers (in '80s teal, peach and some purple) completed the look. But it’s the original viscose crepe pattern that was most memorable - it recalls both a mirrored tribal motif and the waves typical of Florentine endpapers.
<b>What he said: </b>Braganza supports the British mill industry as well as a Swiss-Italian mill that created his piercing, tribal print and it was sharply printed, highly detailed with a 3D effect, and on one sleeve in orange, like a firebird. The pattern on the white leather bomber jacket that has a shape like Neoprene, Braganza explained, was not in fact a printing but a process of lazercutting the leather from the verso, effectively scoring the pattern into the material from beneath. The punctures, not pattern, also create the unique volume by push-pulling on the leather. “I don’t know if you out to unzip her or not,” Dr. Palmer joked, about the convertible outfit on one model. “I generally do but not in public!” Braganza returned, before unzipping the bottom panel off a long jacketed look. Convertibility is a hallmark of his clothes and that particular panel doubles as a skirt.
[related_links /]

Mr. Sinclair is the father of Phoenix, the little aboriginal girl who died at the age of five at the hands of her mother, Samantha Kematch, and her then-lover Karl McKay.

The two were convicted in 2008 of first-degree murder in Phoenix’s death, a death that is estimated to have occurred in June of 2005 but which wasn’t discovered for about 10 months because, after killing her, the couple buried the little girl’s body at the dump on the Fisher Lake First Nation, a reserve about 200 kilometres north of Winnipeg.

His testimony boils down to this: He loved his little girl and raised her, if by raising one means regularly handing her off to friends who were willing caregivers, and he was concerned about Kematch’s way with Phoenix — even that she might be abusive — if by concerned one means fretting, but actually doing bugger all about it.

In April of 2004, Phoenix was living with friends of Mr. Sinclair, Kim Edwards and her then-boyfriend Rohan Stephenson, as the little girl very often was.

Kematch showed up, wanting to take her out. Mr. Stephenson called Mr. Sinclair to say the mother wanted to take her for the afternoon, and was it okay?

Just about everyone was at least aware of and unnerved by Kematch’s attitude toward her daughter; the young mother was at best indifferent to her, at worst potentially dangerous. She’d already had one baby taken into permanent care, and her second child with Mr. Sinclair, Echo, had died of a respiratory infection as an infant, when Phoenix was just-turned-one, in July of 2001.

Mr. Sinclair told Mr. Stephenson it was fine for Phoenix to go with Kematch.

Some time before that spring day in 2004, then, is when Mr. Sinclair last saw his daughter; it’s unclear when precisely it was.

“I waited a couple of days,” he said, before checking with Ms. Edwards and Mr. Stephenson, figuring, as he put it, “Okay, she’s with her mum, she must be fine; she’s with her mother.”

But the mother didn’t bring Phoenix back.

Mr. Sinclair waited a couple of more days, then he and Ms. Edwards “made a couple of calls”. This turns out to have been a call to Winnipeg Child and Family Services, the child-welfare agency that ostensibly had watched over the little girl much of her life.

At first, when Mr. Sinclair described this call, it appeared as though he had been phoning to demand action.

‘She was with her mother, her mother should know better and not hurt her’

But in brief cross-examination by the Winnipeg CFS lawyer, Gordon McKinnon, Mr. Sinclair clarified that he hadn’t suggested Phoenix might be in danger, but rather that he was inquiring as to her whereabouts.

As Mr. McKinnon put it, Mr. Sinclair “wanted an address.”

“I had an assumption she [Kematch] had turned her life around,” Mr. Sinclair told the lawyer. “If not totally, maybe a part of it.” As he testified earlier, “…she was with her mother, her mother should know better and not hurt her.”

“Did you do anything else?” Mr. McKinnon asked.

“No, I went around, I ran it over in my mind — she’s with her mum, why not have her mother parent her?” Mr. Sinclair said.

He speaks like this, oddly passive, filled with the jargon of child-welfare, as one might expect of someone who was himself a permanent ward of the state.

Months later, in the fall of 2004, Mr. Sinclair heard from Mr. Stephenson that there had been a “sighting” of Phoenix with Kematch in a part of Winnipeg.

“I walked by there a few times,” he told Mr. McKinnon. “I didn’t go in the building. She should be fine.”

Mr. Sinclair got on with his life. That December, with a new girlfriend, he moved for about nine months to the Sandy Lake First Nation in Ontario, and stayed there until the following summer.

And there you have it: From sometime in the spring of 2004, when he last saw his daughter, his efforts to find out where and how she was consisted of the following — one phone call, maybe two, to CFS, and a couple of strolls past a building in Winnipeg where the little girl might have been living with Kematch.

He found out she was “missing” in March of 2006, when the police knocked on his door. At that time, he went looking for her around a couple of Winnipeg schools where he’d heard she might have been. The remains of the little girl were discovered in the reserve dump about a month later, on April 20, 2006.

Handout/The Canadian PressPhoenix Sinclair

Now Mr. Sinclair had nothing to do with the murder of his daughter, and workers with the CFS were quite right to anoint him the better parent of the two.

Agency notes made all those years ago describe him as bright and articulate, and full of potential; so he remains. And by the low standards of what those workers routinely see, and in particular by comparison with Kematch, Mr. Sinclair may well have been father of the year.

But he wasn’t. He didn’t have all that much to do with his daughter’s life, either, no matter how much he and those at the inquiry wish it were otherwise.

CFS records show quite clearly that the pattern of Phoenix’s life was set at birth: She was immediately apprehended over concerns about her parents, spent four months in agency care under a “temporary order,” and was returned to them.

Thereafter, she was shifted among homes — Ms. Edwards and Mr. Stephenson’s, one of Mr. Sinclair’s sister’s places, his apartment and later, after the couple split up in the early summer of 2001, Kematch’s — sometimes with the CFS seal of approval, sometimes, this when the agency would close the file, informally.

She was apprehended once under Mr. Sinclair’s care; he was drunk.

Social worker Kim Hansen, who testified here last month, described the scene like this: “There’s gang members in the home and you’ve got a little child of three with gangs and violence and drugs and weapons and no one really seems to be taking care of her.”

Yet Mr. Sinclair was treated with great deference at the inquiry. The few lawyers who questioned him prefaced their softballs with murmurs of sorrow about his loss. Mr. McKinnon even offered that his drinking problem was not that he drank every day.

“Of course not,” Mr. Sinclair replied.

“Your problem was that when you drank you drank a little bit too much?”

“Yes,” Mr. Sinclair said. No one asked if he still drank. No one asked if he had more children, though Mr. Sinclair’s passing complaint that social workers were always urging him to take another parenting class just “like they still do now” invited the question.

Mr. Sinclair’s father was not in his life. His mother, who had gone to residential school, was. There were seven youngsters in the family, and when he was about nine, he ended up going into care. He moved among foster homes, became a permanent ward, and ended up with one foster family for six years.

All things considered, Mr. Sinclair did well, if by well one means for someone whose only parental role model was “television. I wanted to be like them, right?”

WINNIPEG — In my second year of college, living on my own for the first time, both careless and selfish, a kitten I had died. She’d had a runny nose, my roommate nagged me to take her to the vet, but I was too busy, and the kitten died.

A lovely living creature died because of my neglect. I am suffused with shame about it still. For all the small missteps of my life, that is one of a handful of profound regrets.

It is the absence of something similar — a feeling, some acknowledgement of failure, maybe even a hint of sorrow — that is the striking feature of what goes on in the big room on the second floor of the Winnipeg Convention Centre.

This room is home to the provincial inquiry into the death of Phoenix Sinclair, a little native girl who died at the age of five.

Her mother, Samantha Kematch, and her lover, Karl McKay, actually killed Phoenix, on or about June 11, 2005, after subjecting her, as their murder trial four years ago heard, to months of horrific abuse that included keeping the little girl in a basement pen, making her eat her own vomit and shooting her with a BB gun.

But there is a larger ring of those who were complicit in her death — including, arguably, a government that tolerates the fact that about 90% of the youngsters who are in the care of its child-welfare agencies are aboriginal — and chief among these was Winnipeg Child and Family Services (CFS).

Tom AndrichArgentina's Jorge Bergoglio, elected Pope Francis I (C) appears at the window of St Peter's Basilica's balcony after being elected the 266th pope of the Roman Catholic Church on March 13, 2013 at the Vatican. AFP PHOTO / ANDREAS SOLAROANDREAS SOLARO,ANDREAS SOLARO/AFP/Getty Images

It was this agency, and its various workers and their bosses, who collectively knew better than anyone else how shattered a family this was and how dangerous for children.

Both Kematch and Phoenix’s dad, Steve Sinclair, had been wards of the state themselves and were deeply troubled young people.

Information in CFS files revealed Mr. Sinclair had been subjected to violence, sexual abuse and alcohol abuse before he was removed from his home; Kematch had her first child at 17, which was apprehended and made a ward. She was ambivalent at best about Phoenix, who was apprehended at birth. Their second child died as a baby, of complications due to pneumonia.

It was pretty clear from evidence at the inquiry that as parents, the two were a recipe for disaster.

Yet Phoenix kept being put back, first with the pair of them, then, when they split up, with Mr. Sinclair, who was deemed the better parent.

Most CFS witnesses didn’t remember the case of the little girl at all. Most appeared … well, un-stricken by news of her death

The agency would then close the file, again — you can almost hear, through the paperwork on file, the self-satisfied sounds of hands briskly washing themselves clean — until a new crisis came up, as inevitably it did.

Despite his good intentions, for instance, Mr. Sinclair managed only a month on his own before a report came in to CFS that he had left the little girl alone; Kematch had come and picked her up, and then gone out drinking, allegedly also prostituting herself, leaving Phoenix at a crackhouse.

I have heard testimony from only three workers and one supervisor, and a bit from another, but excellent colleagues here in Winnipeg, some of whom have been at the inquiry every day since it started in September, have reported only one episode of tears — this from a supervisor who wept as she talked of the death of a social worker she liked, not of Phoenix.

Most CFS witnesses didn’t remember the case of the little girl at all. Most appeared … well, un-stricken by news of her death. Some, such as the two main witnesses on Tuesday, don’t even remember how they heard Phoenix had died.

As Lisa Conlin, a worker in the CFS intake section who got the case when someone phoned in to report Phoenix was in that crackhouse, said when she was asked how she found out the little girl was dead: “I would have just found out in the news.”

Handout/The Canadian PressPhoenix Sinclair

Her supervisor, Doug Ingram, did her one better: He had no idea how or when he learned of her death. So many times did Mr. Ingram answer a question by saying “I have no independent memory” that it’s a safe bet that, once dressed for the day, he has no idea how it happened.

And, just in case, Mr. Ingram also shredded his notes about the case.

His practice, in stark breach of the policy that requires workers and supervisors both to make notes, especially about key decisions that saw children apprehended or their files closed, was to shred, shred, shred as he went along.

Does it really need saying that he and Ms. Conlin decided to close the file on Phoenix in February of 2004, against the recommendation of another supervisor and after a shoddy and superficial investigation?

After Phoenix’s body was found on a reserve about 200 clicks north of Winnipeg, the CFS did an internal review. By and large, the reviewer pronounced Ms. Conlin’s work — and by inference Mr. Ingram’s supervision — to be excellent.

An outside reviewer, working for the province’s chief medical examiner, later had a much different view. She said that by leaving the little girl in another home — the caregivers there were loving, but the agency gave them no official status and thus no way of keeping Phoenix with them — the CFS “was acquiescing to an arrangement for Phoenix that was tenuous at best.”

Nothing was in place to keep that little girl safe, and so nothing did.

I still properly beat myself up over that poor kitten, but, oh my, there’s little of that going on here.

The thing to remember, as the awful story of Phoenix Sinclair’s short life emerges here at the provincial inquiry into her death, is that she was just one of more than 8,000 aboriginal youngsters in this province who are in the care of child welfare authorities.

That shocking statistic — there are only about 9,000 Manitoba youngsters in care in total, so the aboriginal kids are grossly over-represented — was mentioned by commission council Sherri Walsh in her opening statement in September.

The number underscores the importance of the commission’s work; not to put it too highly, but there are 8,000 other children whose welfare may hang in the balance.

At the time of Phoenix’s birth, Kematch already had a child in care of a Cree agency; a second child they had together died of pneumonia as a baby in the summer of 2001

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Phoenix was five when she was killed in 2005 by her biological mother, Samantha Kematch, and her mother’s boyfriend, Karl McKay, who were subsequently convicted of first-degree murder.

But the mystery is how the little girl’s death went undiscovered for at least several months.

It isn’t clear yet from evidence heard at the inquiry if that was because workers with Winnipeg Child and Family Services simply didn’t notice or because the CFS file on the little girl had been permanently closed and the agency wasn’t involved with the family any longer.

Well, that’s one of the mysteries.

The other, as the inquiry learned in a bombshell revelation last week, is that all the Winnipeg CFS supervisory notes have vanished.

Cameron Spencer/Getty ImagesAsuka Teramoto of Japan competes on the balance beam in the Artistic Gymnastics Women's Team final on Day 4 of the London 2012 Olympic Games.

That means a dozen supervisors have testified or will testify without any ability to refer to critical records.

In any case, that Phoenix was beaten to death wasn’t discovered until her body was found at the Fisher River First Nation, a Cree reserve about 200 kilometres north of Winnipeg.

As Ms. Walsh said in her opening remarks, the question is “how a small child can become so invisible … so invisible as to literally disappear.”

Phoenix was born April 23, 2000 to Kematch and Steve Sinclair, both young, troubled products of the child welfare system themselves (both were raised as wards of the state).

At the time of Phoenix’s birth, Kematch already had a child in care of a Cree agency; a second child they had together died of pneumonia as a baby in the summer of 2001. Though Mr. Sinclair appears to have been deemed the better parent, he had problems with drinking too, and, after their second child died and the couple broke up, with depression.

Phoenix bounced in and out of care, and after her parents split up, was mostly in Mr. Sinclair’s custody, though sometimes still with her mother, and sometimes placed with friends of her father’s — once officially, when the couple’s home was deemed “a Place of Safety,” other times unofficially.

The inquiry is hearing from social workers who dealt with the family, and has now reached 2004 in its chronology, the year before Phoenix was killed.

‘She’s three and three-quarter years old. She can’t look after herself’

Testimony Monday suggests that some of the same problems that were identified years ago in other child-death probes remain unchanged — chiefly, workers’ insistence on seeing the parents as the client and not the child — as well as some unique ones.

Supervisor Heather Edinborough, for instance, hinted at the cross-cultural issues when she spoke of assigning Stan Williams, a family service worker, to the file because as an aboriginal man he was “more culturally appropriate,” and would invite elders to take part in family meetings or sharing circles.

Mr. Williams, who died several years ago, was a proud native man who “walked the red road,” Ms. Edinborough said.

Alas, it appears that when Mr. Williams returned Phoenix to her father’s care, after being taken from him during a weekend drinking party, he offered no reasonable explanation — and did so though he hadn’t been able to persuade Mr. Sinclair to get help for his drinking.

Another worker, Barb Klos, who worked the phones as part of the crisis response unit of the CFS, testified how valuable was her ability, back then, to check with agencies that are called “collaterals” — schools, employment and income-assistance workers and the like.

Ms. Klos, who recently retired, was trying to track down Phoenix’s whereabouts in early 2004, and recommended the little girl’s file be passed on to a family service worker.

“She’s three and three-quarter years old,” she said. “She can’t look after herself.”

It was easy to get such information from other agencies in those days, she said, but new privacy legislation has virtually ended the social worker’s ability to get such additional background information.

As Ms. Walsh said in her opening remarks, the question is ‘how a small child can become so invisible … so invisible as to literally disappear’

As a result of her efforts, a worker was assigned and on Jan. 21 that year, Phoenix was found at the home of the friends who had once been a “Place of Safety.”

But that worker, Lisa Conlin, didn’t act on the recommendation that Phoenix’s file be reopened with a view to making a long-term plan for her.

Ms. Conlin actually interviewed the male friend of the couple, and clamped eyes upon the little girl. But she made no notes about Phoenix, merely looked at her. “There was nothing that concerned me about her appearance.”

“Did you talk to her?” Ms. Walsh asked. “Play with her?”

“No,” said Ms. Conlin.

Phoenix Sinclair was well on her way to invisibility, and, it turned out, death.

WINNIPEG — An inquiry into the death of a young Manitoba girl will examine how she was abused and neglected for months, then killed and buried, all without the knowledge of authorities.

The inquiry into the death of Phoenix Sinclair opened Wednesday with a promise by the lead lawyer that the hearing will be a thorough examination of the province’s child welfare system.

Sherri Walsh told the inquiry the evidence will focus on how Phoenix Sinclair became “invisible” to child welfare workers and her entire community.

One of the central themes of this inquiry, quite plainly, is to consider how it is that in our society, a small child can become so invisible

Sinclair spent most of her life in foster care before being returned to her mother in 2004.

She died at the age of five, after a series of assaults, and her death went unnoticed for several months.

The girl’s mother and her mother’s boyfriend were later convicted of first-degree murder.

“One of the central themes of this inquiry, quite plainly, is to consider how it is that in our society, a small child can become so invisible,” Walsh said in her opening statement.

“Invisible to an entire community, one which includes social service agencies, schools, neighbours friends and family. So invisible as to literally disappear.”

The inquiry is scheduled to run for three months, and will look at broader social issues, including why aboriginal children make up the vast majority of kids in foster care.

Child welfare workers closed Phoenix’s file in early 2005, just a few months before her death. One social worker had gone to check on her and was told she was asleep. The worker saw a sibling playing outside who appeared healthy and left.

According to evidence at the murder trial, Phoenix was frequently confined, shot with a BB gun, forced to eat her own vomit and neglected.

She was killed in the basement of the family’s home on the Fisher River reserve and buried near the community’s landfill. Her mother continued to claim welfare benefits with Phoenix listed as a dependent.